6 Topics for Guaranteed Traffic

What Topics Should You Write About on Your Website?

OK. You’ve got a shiny new website for your business. You know that the way to get website visitors is through excellent, captivating content that people want to read and pass on to their friends. What you don’t know is what to write about. We’re here to help.

I interviewed a host of successful website writers and owners to find out what made their website’s – and their most popular articles – tick. We’ll cover each of these in the 6 Habits of Highly Successful Website Articles Series. Today’s topic is popular topics.

Before you write anything, you’ve got to have a topic. While this may seem easy at the outset, after all, your website is already about something (ex. Website Design). You may find that writer’s block quickly sets in if you get overwhelmed by your subject area. Try any one of these topics for a quick energy boost.

Tutorials

I’ve had most of my success with the tutorials I have made on this site. For example, my Craigslist Image posting article continues to drive traffic and clients to my site. That article alone as more than paid for the cost of creating and running this website. What could one great tutorial do for your business?

Here’s an example of how one developer did it:

I run a modest blog with .NET samples where I describe simple how-to’s that may take forever to find out yourself. The samples serve both as a reminder store for myself and my collegues, but apperantly also for others. A single post from february in which I describe how to call WCF services from Javascript is responsible for half the blog traffic, according to Google Analytics. An even older posting about how to call asmx web services (the precursor to WCF) is responsible for over 25% of the traffic. So quite old two postings about roughly the same subject generate 80% of my traffic.

Apparently a lot of people are trying to write the kinds of applications where these techniques are used, and they cannot find simple enough step-by-step samples. It did not quite influence my way of posting, apart that I spend a lot of more care to my postings, now I see that a lot of people are looking at my blog. And I am shocked to see that if you hit “wcf service javascript” in Google my blog is actually halfway in at the first page.

-Joost van Schaik, Senior Software Architect at Vicrea

Holidays

Holidays are a rich area. People use the web extensively to research holiday themes. Take advantage of their searching to bring new visitors in creative ways to your site.

My most popular post has to be some Halloween wallpapers I gathered back in 1997, sized for 640×480 resolution – and seasonally, it gets many hits.

-Randall Goya Web Developer and Project Manager

Politics

Politics area always a hot button. Construct your article in such a way to attract the right audience and to foster a discussion and there can be tremendous spillover effects. For example, I wrote a post comparing John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s websites and the traffic spike was tremendous.

While my article was from a research perspective, other webmasters have gotten even more creative offerings going on. Check this one out:

We got a bunch of traffic to our blog post where we embedded a beta version of a Flash shooter game for political candidates. Basically, you get to pick which candidate is shooting and they can fire on moose and flying pigs with lipstick.

Scott Germaise, Senior Internet Strategic Product and Project Manager

Sensationalism / Celebrity

Everybody loves a great celebrity story. The web is no different.

A while back when Daniella Cicarelli (Ronaldos’ ex ) tried to get a Brazilian judge to shut down youtube world wide to remove a video of her getting romantic in the surf with a boy friend – I did a test in early 2007 on my blog writing about this and this year I have an average of 120 per day an 35,417 views this year on that post.

Legality

Legal issues are surprisingly popular topics to search for on the web. I have written a few mainly to answer my own questions about issues common to website developers and writers. Can I quote you? and Copying the Copyrighted, articles on the legality of quoting people’s statements on public internet forums are very popular posts for this site. Perhaps you can write an article concerning topical legal issues that your audience face, too.

Here’s another example:

I wrote a post about the illlegality of spouses tapping one another’s phones and you wouldn’t believe the traffic that popped up overnight. For some reason people really wanted to know whether or not they could go around monitoring their spouse’s phone calls. In California it’s completely illegal as we have one of the more strict wiretapping laws.

-Erick Rhoan, Law Clerk Volunteer at United States Attorney’s Office

Religion

They say that there are several topics you should never discuss in polite company and religion is one of them. What do people do when they want to learn more or talk about these topics anonymously? They head to the internet! As for what happens when another passion collides with religion? Meridith had an example about shoes:

My most popular posts seem to be the ones where I zoom in on a link between Judaism and Christianity…and mention food. Although my all-time most popular post was my commentary about Pope Benedict XVI’s shoes.

There you have 6 topics for the next time you’re stuck looking at the keyboard for something to add to your site. Some will be good for qualified traffic, others will be good for exposure and back links, each should be good for future traffic.